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Uzbekistan's Medical Drama Trudges Forward

The will he, won’t he medical drama gripping Uzbekistan and its stricken president has taken a fresh turn with suggestions from his daughter that he may be on the mend.

Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva wrote in an Instagram post on August 31 that she wanted to thank well-wishers worried about Islam Karimov’s health and expressed confidence that “the enormous power of goodness coming from deep within your hear will help him get better.”

It was Karimova-Tillyaeva who revealed in an Instragram earlier in the week that the president had succumbed over the weekend to a cerebral hemorrhage.

More indiscretions about Karimov’s medical treatment trickled out of Moscow. Russian business daily RBK reported, citing sources in medical circles, that doctors from the Burdenko Neurosurgery Institute in Moscow had traveled to Uzbekistan to help treat Karimov. The news was confirmed to RBK by the head of scientific research at the Burdenko institute, Alexander Konovalov.

“Our doctors have been there for a long time, since the very beginning,” Konovalov told the newspaper.

Earlier in the day, Russian deputy prime minister Olga Golodets told reporters that although there was a bilateral agreement between Russia and Uzbekistan to provide medical treatment to the Uzbek head of state if needed, this option was not seized upon.

“We always provide assistance if they appeal to us over technologically difficult operations that cannot be performed in neighboring countries. But we have had no request,” she said.

Unaccountably, every passing day appears to bring less certainty not more. The news about Karimov’s would-be death was broken by Central Asia-focused news website ferghana.ru. The website later modified its position to state that Karimov had been declared clinically dead.

These are all fundamentally formalities, however, since alive or dead, it appears obvious that Karimov is unable to fulfill even basic institutional functions like laying flowers at the monument of independence on August 31. That task fell instead to Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who was accompanied by Senate speaker Nigmatilla Yuldashev and the speaker of the lower house, Nurdinjon Ismoilov.

Perhaps it is significant here that Yuldashev was present at this ceremony, since he is nominally supposed to take over the president’s duties while he is incapacitated. When Turkmenistan’s late President Saparmurat Niyazov died in late 2006, the then-speaker in that country, Ovezgeldy Ataev, was swiftly arrested and excluded from the entire process. If Yuldashev manages to avoid the same fate and Karimov fails to return to his post, he would have to occupy the presidency for three months before a presidential election is held.